This shouldn't surprise me, but it would seem that freedom tastes like cheese.
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| FONDUE IN A RICE COOKER = BLOWING MY MIND. |
How do I know? Well, as self-appointed office Food Czar (yeah, it's in my email signature...sometimes), I'm the "organizer" of sporadic department potlucks or food excursions. I equivocate on the term "organizer" because all I do is send an Outlook invite and come up with an absurd, poorly thought-out theme.
For the potluck I "organized" last week -- a thank you and farewell lunch for our awesome interns -- my absurd, poorly thought-out theme for the dishes was the following: I encouraged everyone to make and bring a dish that provides an answer to "What does freedom taste like to me?"
Really, don't ask me how I think of these ideas.
Anyways, it turns out that we had an extreme preponderance of cheese. I brought freedom baguette with freedom Camembert and a homemade strawberry-thyme compote (get it? Ok, lame, but tasty), but there were pizzas (freedom to order over the internet, i.e. speech), cupcake-sized cheesecakes (I think this one was freedom to choose your own toppings), and a classic fondue lovingly crafted in a rice cooker (BRILLIANT; meant to symbolize freedom of association AND America's melting-pot nature).  |
| To dip in fondue. |
I also covered pizza in fondue, which sort of makes a First Amendment sandwich (freedom of association and speech, plus the freedom to later practice a religion in honor thereof).
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| It's a lousy picture, but trust me: It's pizza with a healthy glomp of Gruyere fondue |
Other dishes were tasty and creative too. We had a pasta salad that, to the creator, represented freedom in that it's the first dish she could make with confidence after leaving home. One of my Yehudi brethren made a Ashkenazi charoset, the traditional apple, walnut, wine and honey dish eaten at Passover -- which is ALL about freedom. We had vegetables to be slathered in a number of different dips (freedom of choice) and chips to dip in choices of salsa. But clearly, the focus was cheese. 
All in all, we had potluck success. And each of us ate many times the recommended daily serving of cheese.
